Books I Cannot Finish: American Nightmare by T.K. Murphy

I hate giving books a low rating. I do appreciate the effort of putting your work out there but sometimes, a book comes along that is just so bad that I couldn’t even finish it.

Unfortunately, this is one of them. It’s a mere 59 pages on Adobe Digital Editions but I wanted to give up right around page 15. The premise of the story is pretty interesting. An average nice guy has been living the American dream of a good job and a family until his wife filed for divorce four years ago. Then he got laid off at his job of 32 years. Being 52 years old, he wasn’t eligible for retirement yet… basically, everything falls apart around him. Then he snaps. Based on the cover art, he goes all Dexter on the people around him. Great, I love Dexter. This should be good.

But it’s not. It’s really not. The writing wasn’t good. It’s choppy and inconsistent and redundant. And most of all, it was BORING. There was pages upon pages of description and back story to introduce the main character, Bob, but it was so boring and cliche, I didn’t care much for him. Everyone’s an alcoholic, Bob’s a doormat… I don’t think a page went by without a retelling of those two things. And the formatting problems. Oh my, is it too much to ask for dialog paragraph breaks? Huge chunks of text with 2-3 people talking in them. I salute self-published authors but come on… a little editing goes a very long way.

I should stop now, really. I feel bad bashing a book but I just did not like any part of this.